PiP (bolt Action): 50 shades of grey, monchrome chindits, part1-> the inspiration

 What the hell!!!

Where are the three colors minimum?

A while ago a gaming friend of mine assembled a 40K Chaos marine army.  After priming the models black and hours of basing coating, hi-lighting, washing and blending, the models ended up almost a colour perfect match for plastic grey models still on the sprue. That was my first impression of an attempt a monochrome army.

Since then things have moved on a bit. For my Bolt Action army I wanted to try out something different painting wise. I am pretty sure I could have paint a decent looking ww2 chindit force in full colour but painting outside of the comfort zone seemed to tempting to avoid (Yes, I am the guy who push the mysteries red button just to see what it does*)

There are three main sources for inspiration for the monochrome (also known as grey scale) project. First and most recent is a talk with the guys from MassiveVoodoo. For me, they are one of the most inspirational painting blogs out there at the moment. At Adepticon I was luckily enough to attend one of their painting seminars. Sadist-icily aimed to end at midnight to deprive participations of value able drinking time. None the less their talk of colour theory and zentinel lighting was one of the hi lights (get it) of the event. One of Roman's remarks opening remarks was that painting in just black and white was a lot more difficult than it seemed. After the talk I talked to the guys a bit more about painting in monochrome and I got some good pointers and tips.

The second source of inspiration was Curt over at Analogue Hobbies. I have been keeping an eye on the painting league that is running out of his site. The standard of the entries are awesome. One in particular stood out, I am not sure for how long but for a while Kurt has been building up a fantastic looking WW1 project in grey-scale. His notes on the project and his reference links added more momentum to the project.

The current bolt action force with fifty two personnel, and two mules, the entire force will probably only get about sixty to seventy men 

The third source of inspiration, and actually the first time I had seen monochrome done well, was the flames of war 24 hour painting challenge video. Sadly I can not find the link to the video anywhere. The challenge was to paint a FOW army within 24hrs The video interviewed the contenders at various stage of the challenge. The video stood out for two reason. First was the transformation from the eager and keen painters at to the start to irritable and exhausted painters after only 24 hours without sleep. The second was that one of the contenders did an SAS desert raiding force. The force was raiding at night so everything was painted in black and white except where the machine guns fire where everything nearby was illuminated by the machine gun fire. It was an impressive theme, even more so considering the force was to have been assembled and painting within 24 hours.

Random mule picture, because I like the model

* The red button is this case, was power off button. Done at the start of a presentation in work leaving me standing in front of a group Managers and engineers waiting for five minutes for the machine to restart.